Recently, I attended a media lunch hosted by a book publisher during which, just as salads were served, the conversation turned to marriage and murder—more specifically, how the first can lead to the second. While discussing a forthcoming novel about the killing of an estranged husband, several guests felt liberated to share their darkest fantasies about an angry ex-spouse or a meddlesome family member suffering a well-timed car crash or heart attack. Books about divorce are all the rage, and so, it seems, are divorce stories shared around communal tables. The challenge for a writer entering this crowded field is to say something new on a subject that has become so common over the past few years that it’s been relegated to small talk.
First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
No Fault, Haley Mlotek’s new memoir and history of divorce, finds fresh material in part by refusing to traffic in the usual anecdotes. As Rachel Vorona Cote wrote this week for The Atlantic, “No Fault is not a love story, or even a life story, because it refuses to tell a story in the first place. It is neither chronicle, nor testimony, nor confession.” Mlotek’s book is relatively scant on personal details, Cote writes, when compared with recent books such as Leslie Jamison’s Splinters or Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife. Mlotek does try to explain her reticence: Her divorce narrative is opaque, she says, because it is obscure to her. She’s dedicated to the idea that, as Cote puts it, “no person can ever fully know her own mind,” and feels no anxiety about it. “My friends and I are alike in that none of us had any idea why my marriage ended,” Mlotek writes. “We are different in that they think they can find the answer, and I know I never will.”
Mlotek was fascinated by divorce long before she wed her boyfriend of more than a decade—only to end the marriage a year later. Her mother was a divorce mediator, she shares, and when she was growing up, “all the adults I knew were getting divorced, or should have been.” In No Fault, she provides a sweeping survey of the novels, nonfiction books, and films about love on the rocks that she turned to during and after her divorce. For Mlotek, Cote writes, marriage is “an ill-fitting arrangement” that in many cases fails to squeeze the unruly experience of love into a relationship escalator that culminates in unchanging bliss.
Last week in The Atlantic, Mlotek shared her appreciation for the varieties of love via a list of her favorite books on the topic. Among them are The End of the Novel of Love, Vivian Gornick’s lament for the decline of the romance plot; Susan Minot’s Rapture, which contemplates a destructive affair in the course of describing a single sex act; and A Year on Earth With Mr. Hell, Young Kim’s memoir of a dalliance with the punk musician and writer Richard Hell. Describing Fanny Howe’s novel Famous Questions, about a love triangle that upends a family, Mlotek observes that “the only reassurance two people can give each other is that they share a story, and to agree on what that story means.”
Mlotek’s memoir represents an attempt to chronicle what happens when that shared outline breaks down. Was the story true? If not, how can the story of what comes next—the story of divorce—be reconstructed from the wreckage? The more honest report, she seems to say, is that neither love nor divorce are subject to neat timelines and rational explanations—even if they do make for some very entertaining mealtime conversations.
